After 29 months away from the octagon, Mike Swick is happy just to get back to work.

“When you’ve fought as much as I have, you don’t like sitting on the sidelines for two-and-a-half years,” he today told MMAjunkie.com Radio (www.mmajunkie.com/radio). “I just want to get in there and do my job.”

After multiple health issues forced an epic layoff, Swick (14-4 MMA, 9-3 UFC) has made changes to how he prepares for that job in advance of a fight with DaMarques Johnson (16-10 MMA, 4-4 UFC).

In training camp for the fight, which takes place on the FUEL TV-televised preliminary card of UFC on FOX 4 (the event is scheduled for Aug. 4 at Staples Center in Los Angeles), Swick put on more padding than ever to protect himself during sparring.

Those sharp, cutting elbows? Wrapped in the shock-absorbing foam of pads.

He took special care to avoid the kinds of positions that led to his most recent catastrophe. Two weeks prior to a scheduled fight with Erick Silva at UFC 134, he was wrestling with then-teammate Josh Koscheck. His leg stuck in an awkward position on a takedown. He blew out his ACL, MCL and tore his meniscus.

At the time of his knee injury, Swick had already spent 18 months on the shelf as the result of an esophageal spasm that had been misdiagnosed as a stomach condition called dyspepsia. He had already modified his diet to where he wasn’t wasting away because he literally couldn’t stomach most food.

The veteran of “The Ultimate Fighter 1″ was falling further off the radar with every passing month. The last time fans saw him, he was getting choked out by Paulo Thiago at UFC 109 in February 2010.

So when he got notice he’d been fighting Johnson, he made a rule for himself: No more getting into “crazy” positions in sparring that exposed his limbs to the full weight of his teammate’s body. He put on more padding. He tried to train smarter.

“You have to train,” Swick said. “I mean, that’s just the bottom line. It sucks because we train really hard, and you can’t predict when these injuries is going to happen. But we did, in this fight camp, take a lot of precautions that we haven’t taken in the past.”

Of course, he realizes he can’t shrink-wrap himself or just stick to the treadmill. He can’t predict when injury will strike. There’s risk involved just putting on the gloves. But he’s tried to minimize the possibility of another career-killing layoff.

“You’ve got to take your chances, but we’re calculating them so we take them at the right time, and for the right reasons,” Swick said.

Because he’s been gone so long, Swick feels like he’s starting his career over again. But at the very least, he’s just about made it through another camp – just two weeks until fight time.

Cross your fingers.

“Honestly, I feel like this is going to be my first fight at welterweight,” he said.

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